The six most surprising things from Facebook's IPO filing

User activity remains boisterous Yes, Facebook's user base is massive. At 845 million
unique visits per month, nearly one sixth of the world is visiting
the site.

But they're doing more than that. Daily user engagement is up in
a big way, scaling from 200 million daily active users (or DAU, in
Facebook's S-1 parlance) in March of 2009 to over four times that
amount as of December of this year.

And most of that growth is coming from outside of the United
States. The key areas, Facebook states, are Brazil and India, with
37 million and 46 million monthly active users (or MAUs) in
December.

No stranger to IP lawsuits The knock-down, drag-out court battles of Valley giants
Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple (among many others) have been
splayed across headlines for months. Everyone wants a piece of
everyone else's profit pies, and intellectual property lawsuits
based on patent claims seem the best way to go about it. Suing your competitors -- and, in some cases, even your
manufacturing partners (I'm looking at you both, Samsung and Apple)
-- is commonplace.

Facebook isn't exempt. "Defending patent and other intellectual
property claims is costly," Facebook acknowledges. In the course of
this it "may receive unfavorable preliminary or interim rulings" in
its cases. As a result, "there can be no assurances that favourable
final outcomes will be obtained in all cases."

It's still Zuck's Sste The amount of shares owned by executives and other
investors has been speculated upon for years, though we've known
that Zuck has always been the largest shareholder.

What's surprising, however, is how wide that margin is between
Zuck's stake and the next in line. Zuckerberg owns more than half a
billion shares of the company, amounting to a 28.4 percent stake in
Facebook. The next largest individual shareholder is James
Breyer of venture capital firm Accel Partners, with fewer
than half that amount of shares.

Interestingly enough, outside of Zuckerberg and Breyer, there's
only one other individual who owns a relatively significant
percentage of the company who is neither an employee nor an
investor: Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. He owns over 130 million
shares, or 7.6 percent of the company.